Life After Deaf

by Noel Holston

  My stepdaughter Downie confided to her mother that I seemed to have lost a dozen IQ points. It’s painful to be told that, but I got it. Sitting at my computer, I felt I’d never been sharper mentally. Sitting on the living room sofa, I couldn’t chew gum and listen at the same time. I expended so much energy and focus just trying to sort out what people were saying, comments and comebacks occurred to me long after the subject had changed.

  Sometimes I would raise my hand or clear my throat, interrupt the conversational flow, and say something like, “Can we backtrack for just a moment?” I would reintroduce a topic, add the thought or the information that had come to me belatedly, and then tighten my jaw, flex my ears, and prepare to try to capture the response as if I were getting ready to deadlift a hefty barbell. Sometimes it helped. Other times, I was just reminded that, hearing-wise, I was now the proverbial ninety-eight-pound weakling.

  4 Katherine Bouton, Shouting Won’t Help: Why I—and 50 Million Other Americans‚—Can’t Hear You (New York: Sarah Crichton Books, FSG, 2013), 186–187.

  Chapter 8

  Pride and Prejudice

  I almost titled this book Deaf Be Not Proud, and not just because I have seldom met a pun I didn’t like. If you are dealing with a substantial hearing loss, you can’t afford to be proud or vain. Rule number one for coping is:

  Do Not Try to Hide Your Disability

  It will only make things worse.

  There will be people who will judge you if you have a visible hearing aid or cochlear implant. They may presume you are older than you are. Or slower. Or dumber. Or less capable. You could say, “Well, that’s their problem,” and that’s true. But it’s also yours, and you have to deal with it.

  You need to take a pad and pen with you wherever you go—and not be embarrassed to use it.

  You need to do your eating out earlier, if possible, before restaurants get more crowded and noisy.

  You need to ask for tables on the edges of dining rooms, a corner if possible, and give yourself the seat that puts your back against a wall, minimizing the surrounding buzz.

  And you have to become a coach of sorts. You have to explain the new ground rules. Most people, even family and friends, don’t know what to do instinctively besides talk louder. Loudness is in fact more likely to reduce a hearing-impaired person’s comprehension of speech.

  Rude as it may seem, you have to ask people to make sure they have your full attention before they start talking. If you are seriously hearing impaired, there’s no such thing as casual conversation. You can’t hear out of “the corner of your ear.” You probably can’t listen while doing any chore that requires focus. Missing just two or three words at the beginning of someone’s comment to you can leave you to play a hopeless game of catch-up. Context is paramount.

  You have to ask people to look directly at you when they are speaking to you. Even if you can’t speechread (the new term for lipreading), there are clues in a speaker’s expressions and body language that you don’t even have to be actively aware of to incorporate into your understanding. We hear with our eyes, too.

  If you are part of a group gathering, you have to ask people to speak one at a time.

  This last is not easy. Even friends with the best of intentions often get carried away in the excitement of a conversation and forget your request. It’s not natural to take turns.

  In the first months of my hearing loss, when various drugs were producing wild swings, nothing made me want to pull my hair out, bang my head on the table, or just walk away, alone, more than Happy Hour.

  Athens, often cited as one of the great college towns in America, is a place where drinking is an activity almost as popular as breathing. Soon after Marty and I moved to Athens, a couple of old friends invited us to be part of their Happy Hour group, a floating gaggle of fifteen to twenty people—university faculty and staff, musicians, an ER doctor, a carpenter, a city attorney—who got together at one of the town’s many bars around six on Friday nights to have a Terrapin (the local microbrew) or a Pabst Blue Ribbon and shoot the breeze about their workweek, politics, music, and the world. The conversations were fast, funny, and profane. Topics could change in a heartbeat. I loved these gatherings. Many times we walked away from Max Canada or The Go Bar toward a nearby soul food or pizza emporium saying, “God, I love this town.”

  I still loved Athens after my hearing loss, but Happy Hour? Not so much. Even at an outdoor patio table with less surrounding noise, trying to keep up with a conversation that jumped like an eight-way air hockey match was challenging and ultimately defeating. You listen so hard it strains your brain. Your eyes dart this way and that, constantly, looking for lip movement to go with what sound you do hear. Occasionally, you catch a phrase you recognize, but by the time you extrapolate a larger thought or sentence from it and think up a comment or retort, the conversation has shifted or moved on. If you’re feeling assertive, you will raise your hand, like you’re a kid in class, and ask if could take the conversation back a few seconds, rewind, and offer your thought on the topics. Sometimes it will add to the conversation. Sometimes you’ll realize you misheard what was said and that your comment is a non sequitur. Sometimes you will just sip your beer and laugh anytime you see other people at the table laughing.

  You have to brief people about how to talk to you if they expect you to grasp what they’re saying. And you have to be pushy enough to remind them when they almost invariably forget. Even my brother, after dealing professionally with the deaf and hard of hearing for four decades, forgets. Whenever I visit him in Mobile, at some point I will have to remind him that he can’t run water in the kitchen sink while he’s talking to me or turn on an electric can opener. A healthy ear is a multitasking marvel, capable of selectively sifting an amazing array of sonic input. Mine, alas, had become a masked marvel.

  Chapter 9

  Location, Location, Location

  The microwick Dr. Hoffmann had placed in my right eardrum was no more successful than the methotrexate. After two months of my dutifully drizzling steroid drops directly down my ear canal without any lasting impact, Dr. Hoffmann told me to discontinue the treatment and start thinking seriously about a cochlear implant. The more immediate issue for me, however, was my younger son’s wedding in Minneapolis, set for early August. I asked Dr. Hoffmann if she could give me a fresh prescription of the oral Prednisone that, with luck, would give me a temporary hearing boost that would enable me to hear the vows and make conversation.

  I started taking the drug the day before Marty and I flew north, trying to time it so that the peak of my steroid-fueled hearing would coincide with the big day. The strategy was moderately successful. Conversations over drinks or dinner were the usual frustrating trial, but I made myself relish opportunities just to be in the spirit of the banter among Alexander and his partner-to-be, Morgen, and my older son, Damon, and his wife, Alice, and their friends. Even if the chatter was too quick and random for me to follow, it was sweet just to watch their expressions and soak up their high spirits. And when we were in a car, zipping around Minneapolis picking up their suits at the tailor’s and shopping for cool socks and suspenders, I could understand a good bit of what was said.

  The wedding itself was like a pantomime play. An outdoor affair, set up at the foot of an historic stone bridge across the Mississippi River, it was unintelligible. When Xan and Morgen exchanged vows, the words evaporated into the open air. I had to be content to watch their lips move and see their smiles.

  At the reception afterward, I was asked to make a toast. Thanks as much to the miracle of bone conduction of sound in my skull as to the Prednisone, I could hear what I said. Later on, the newlyweds sent me a copy of the vows I couldn’t hear.

  I also got to see, if not quite hear, Marty perform that week at the Minneapolis Fringe Festival, a showcase for dance, music, and other performing arts, often as not quirky and irreverent. Backed by guitarist Tate Ferguson and Kate Bordeaux, one of her Collective bandmates, she sang liv
e accompaniment for new works by two different dance companies. For one, she performed “At Last,” “Sunday Kind of Love,” and other Etta James songs. The other company created dances to songs of hers—and ours.

  The worst moment of the trip was when I yelled at her while she was driving. She had missed a turn and I went ballistic. She forgave me, but she said it was only because she knew I was on steroids.

  I determined that after I got home, I was done with steroids for good. I would leave ’roid rage to the professional athletes.

  The trip home was like a movie, too. An absurdist comedy. A Monty Python sketch.

  Marty stayed on in Minneapolis for another music gig. I flew back accompanied by my stepdaughter. What made airport security in Minneapolis search me, I still can’t figure. Maybe they were picking passengers at random. Maybe they thought I was a particularly wily terrorist who had mastered the art of disguising himself as a sleep-deprived, middle-aged bozo in cargo shorts who had partied too hard at his son’s wedding reception. Maybe they thought the big red “C” on my Colbert Report baseball cap stood for Communist. Maybe it’s because hearing impairment can make you seem odd and thus suspicious.

  They were after me from the moment I showed my Georgia driver’s license and got my boarding pass scribbled on. A TSA agent spoke to me and motioned with his hands palm up.

  I said, “I’m sorry, sir, I can’t hear.” He reemphasized the gesture emphatically, the hand-signal equivalent of yelling. I said, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you want me to do.”

  I suggested he talk to my traveling companion, Downie, who is biracial and doesn’t look remotely like me. “She can translate,” I said.

  He ignored that and made the gesture again. I gestured back with what I would call my “I’m clueless” shrug. He grabbed me by both wrists and turned my palms up. Then he wiped each with some sort of napkin pad and motioned for me to move on.

  I was thinking, “Well, that’s the famous ‘Minnesota nice’ for ya. Them Norskies are makin’ sure I don’t catch a flu bug or something.”

  I proceeded to the conveyor belt, dumped my tennis shoes and change into a bin, and put my carry-on bag behind it. The guard at the walk-through scanner looked annoyed when I told him I couldn’t understand his words, but he let me through. Then, as I went to collect my stuff, a grim-faced guard, a woman, said something to me.

  Downie stepped in quickly this time: “He’s deaf, ma’am.” And then, to me, she mouthed, slowly: “She asked if she can search your bag.”

  I shrugged. Sure. Fine. No problem.

  The woman put on protective latex gloves and used another of those wipes to rub around the inside of the bag. Then she tested what’s on the wipe in a computerized machine that gave a readout. Downie and I were standing there rolling our eyes at each other, and other travelers were looking at us funny.

  I was wondering, “Do they think I’m smuggling drugs?” I was wondering what on Earth caught their attention, and I was about to say, “If there’s white powder, it’s Gold Bond,” when it hit me. I had a small can of shoe polish in the bag that I had neglected to transfer to my baggie of liquids.

  The woman soon pulled out the little can, which was unfortunately wrapped up in the cloth I use to apply it. The shoe polish color was oxblood, so when she pulled the cloth out, it looked as though it might contain a severed finger or a bloody eyeball.

  She gingerly carried it over to the X-ray, holding it at arm’s length. She ran it through the machine, and after much deliberation, she and two other guards determined that, yes, it was a can of shoe polish. And I was thinking, “You know, you could have just asked.”

  Next, they ran my carry-on through X-ray again, presumably to be safe, and they got agitated all over again. She put my bag back on the table and rummaged through it, pulling out my blue boxer shorts embossed with images of penguins, a couple of Marty’s CDs, my toothbrush, and the arch supports from my wedding shoes.

  Finally, she carefully lifted an object out of the suitcase that, from a distance, looked as though it had wires sticking out of it. And I went, “Aha!”

  It was a bolo tie, black and silver with a blue stone inset, that my father-in-law, Don Winkler, an auto mechanic-turned-jewelry maker in retirement, made for me.

  What it obviously was, however, the guard didn’t seem to grasp. Or maybe she was just following protocol. She unwrapped the tissue I had put around the stone to protect it and then, very carefully, as though it were a snake that might bite her, she took the bolo to the X-ray. After much deliberation, she and another TSA agent confirmed that it was indeed jewelry. She put it back in the bag and set the bag on a table. It now looked like raccoons had gone through it looking for grubs. She motioned to me. I indicated, again, that I am nearly deaf. She leaned over and said loudly in my left ear, “You’re done!”

  No “Thank you for your patience,” no “Sorry,” no sign of embarrassment. She just walked away.

  I packed up, and Downie and I headed for our gate. Since we got no explanation, I can only guess how it might have looked to them: that the can of something semisolid and the bolo strings with metal tips were the makings of an explosive device.

  Flying back to Atlanta, where the same “bomb fixings” had sailed through security without a word a few days earlier, I contemplated what a strange and inconsistent activity keeping us safe from underwear and shoe bombers is. And I realized I had been taught two valuable lessons about modern air travel:

  Deafness can foster behavior that makes you look furtive and shifty. Try not to dart your eyes around too much at airports.

  If you plan to accessorize with a dangerous bolo tie in another city, don’t pack it, wear it.

  * * *

  Soon after Marty got back from Minneapolis, we drove to Atlanta yet again, this time to meet with Dr. Hoffmann and start making plans for the surgery. She surprised us by asking which of my ears I would prefer to have implanted. I had thought it obvious: the right ear, the one that we’d been trying to salvage. But she said the left, in which I still had a little natural hearing remaining, might be a better candidate.

  I nixed that based on the marvelous, inexplicable fact that perhaps from natural compensation or perhaps because of the Prednisone, my left ear hearing had improved a little over the summer. I had years earlier given my left ear up for lost. It had gradually become so weak that by 2008, my brother, the audiology professor, had persuaded me to abandon my old in-ear hearing aid. He fitted me for a “BiCROS” hearing aid system. The aid I wore on my left had had both amplification and a tiny broadcasting device. Sound coming from my left would be picked up and relayed like a radio signal to a receiver on my right ear. The signal could be amplified, but my right ear was still so good at that point that amplification wasn’t necessary.

  The amazing thing about this system, Tim had told me, was that even though I would be hearing all the sound around me by way of my right ear, the brain—my brain—would adjust and make it possible to discern automatically where sounds were originating. I wouldn’t have to worry about stepping into the path of a bus I thought was coming from the right when it was actually on my left.

  He was correct. The BiCROS worked beautifully, at least until my good right ear died.

  During my summer of drugs, however, the left ear had definitely made a comeback. I could hear water running in the sink. I could hear my own voice in my head. If Marty put her lips an inch or two from my ear and spoke slowly, I could understand simple questions like “Got…any…thoughts…about…dinner?”

  I had the right-side half of my BiCROS system, the piece that could amplify, converted to fit my reborn left ear. It wasn’t doing the right ear any good.

  So, when Dr. Hoffmann asked which ear I wanted implanted, it was no contest. Now there are hybrid implants that allow a combination of digital stimulation and natural hearing. The implantation possible in 2010 would effectively “kill” the designated ear. If the implant doesn’t work or you don’t like how it sounds,
too bad. The insertion does serious damage to the inner ear and is almost certainly irreparable. No way would I risk that little bit of left-ear hearing. With the implant stored away at night, my deafness would be total. I would not even be able to hear myself swallow. No way would I make this gamble. To this day, the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is rub my hand across my outer left ear. I hear muffled, amorphous sound akin to the crumpling of paper. It is, metaphorically at least, music to my ear.

  I told Dr. Hoffmann my left ear was off limits. Do the right thing.

  Chapter 10

  Masters of Disguise

  Only a few companies manufacture and market cochlear implants: Cochlear, MED-EL, and Advanced Bionics. Dr. Hoffmann, like all the Atlanta-area ear surgeons I surveyed, uses Cochlear exclusively. It’s a company that originated in Australia but does the bulk of its business in the United States, with its headquarters in Denver. I was scheduled to be implanted with one of Cochlear’s state-of-the-art Nucleus 5s in September.

  Clear, frank, and thorough information about implants is not easy to come by. I am surely not the first prospective implantee to notice this, but I also would venture to say that my three decades in journalism, a field in which curiosity and skepticism are fundamental tools, made me acutely aware of it.

  Dr. Hoffmann did show me a diagram of the Nucleus 5 and a sample. It’s a spiny little thing that made me think of fossils of prehistoric fish I’ve seen on Nature or NOVA. The surgeon threads a fine wire festooned with twenty-two tiny transistors into the twisting chambers of the cochlea. The filament attaches to a chip, a teensy circuit board, that is placed just inside the skull, about an inch above the ear. The outer piece of the implant, the processor, looks and sits on the ear like a hearing aid, but in fact it’s a powerful minicomputer that digitizes the sound waves it receives and transmits them to those microtransistors by way of a coil that attaches, like a refrigerator magnet, to the skull directly atop the metal disc inside your head.